Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday June 05, 2012 @03:07AM
from the two-devices-for-the-price-of-three dept.

MrSeb writes with the scoop on Asus's new Transformer tablet/laptop devices: "If you've ever looked at an Asus Transformer and wished that it was slightly bigger, had an x86 processor, and ran Windows, I have good news: At Computex in Taiwan, Asus has unveiled just that. Dubbed the Transformer Book, this isn't some wimpy Atom-powered thing either: This Transformer will ship with a range of Ivy Bridge Core i3/5/7 processors and discrete Nvidia graphics. Like its Android-powered predecessors, the Transformer Book is a touchscreen tablet computer that plugs into keyboard docking station, effectively becoming a laptop (or ultrabook, if you prefer). Rounding out the specs, the Transformer Book will come in a range of models (11.6, 13, and 14 inches), your choice of SSD or HDD, up to 4GB of RAM. All three models will have an IPS display capable of full HD (1920×1080). There's a webcam on the front of the tablet portion of the Transformer, and a 5-megapixel shooter on the back. There's no mention of wireless connectivity, but presumably there's Bluetooth and WiFi; on the wired side, there seems to be only a single micro-HDMI socket (on the tablet), and a USB socket (on the keyboard/dock). On the software side, the Transformer Book will of course run Windows 8. It all sounds great — but Asus kept one tiny tidbit out of its presentation: battery life."
Aside from the Nvidia graphics (which, from the looks of it, can be disabled for the on-chip output), perhaps this could be the first "tablet" capable of running fully Free Software? (UEFI evil aside).

I gave it a quick look. The zenbooks has 4+ hrs of battery life, promising as the transformer may be similar there, but the display is glossy. The review said that the gloss was toned down, but I don't know what lays in that.

I got an iPad2 here, and that display is too glossy for my taste, but less glossy than my laptop.

Also, I would like touch. It's nice for scrolling webpages at least, though I don't know how well Windows pulls it off.

Depending on what you want, some resellers offer different screens for laptops. Xoticpc is one such place that despite the silly name does a good job. They are where I got my laptop from. When it is available, they offer multiple screen options for a laptop. The one I ordered (a big Sager laptop) had 4 choices, two matte two glossy.

So if you have a display preference, they can be a place to check out (there are other shops like them). They sell mostly MSI, ASUS, and Sager laptops. Not every laptop has scree

If it only runs windows8, there is plenty of reason not to buy it. I'm fairly certain that if it's not going to be able to do a downgrade to windows7, a lot of people will not want it because of the playskool interface. Asus will probably bring out a bios update to enable other OSes if that happens, so it won't be long before you can run something else on it.

Hasn't the history of tablets taught you nothing? It's precisely the use of traditional operating systems grafted onto tablets which are the prime reason for their lackluster performance... at least until the iPad with a tablet-oriented interface.

Point being, the "playskool" interface makes perfect sense on a touch-based device. There's a reason most people believe Windows 8 has a much higher chance of success on tablets instead of on the desktop.

Metro is inspiring anger not for being a tablet interface but for treating desktop users as second class citizens and for essentially deprecating classic Windows altogether. I think Metro could work pretty well on a desktop if it offered functionality analogous to the start menu but it doesn't. Everything is shoehorned into the flat, linear tile metaphor and collision between the old and new world looks terrible.

So the way it should work is Windows on the desktop runs with a normal desktop, mouse and keyboard UI. However Metro apps can run, and they run in their own window, or fullscreen if the user wants. Basically it adds functionality to your desktop. You can run smartphone and tablet apps, if you find a reason to. Wonderful.

However instead they try to treat your system like it IS a smartphone, despite of course it being operated by KB + M, and just throwing in classical desktop operation as an afterthought. They really seem to think full screen tablet like apps are the future. They aren't, of course, having multiple windows to work with is one of the big points of a modern desktop system.

Worse still? They are doing it on their server OS. Server 2012 has all the same metro-ified UI even though it is clearly of no use there.

This is marketing overriding reality. I'd bet a dollar that MS research has studies that show that Metro is great on touchscreens, not great on KB + M. Microsoft actually does lots of real empirical research on their UIs. However the marketing department probably decided they loved the idea of One UI To Rule Them All and that they could use it to push MS smartphones and tablets and so said "No, Metro is THE UI, make it happen!"

Net result? People will refuse to upgrade to 8. They'll keep running 7. What's worse is it will create a mentality like with XP of not wanting to upgrade. People will decide 7 is the only "good Windows" and won't upgrade. So in 2020 we'll be trying to push people to Windows 10, which ill be a good OS, but they'll be resisting because "7 is the only good one."

I am really just getting sick of this fucking tablet/smartphone obsession UI designers have these days. We get it, the smartphone market is huge. That's wonderful, I love mine, by all means let's have good UIs for them. But stop trying to fucking force that shit on the desktop. It is a different paradigm. Hell you see it with Unity for Linux just as much as Metro for Windows. This "OMG SHINY TABLETZ!!!" attitude of UI development.

Of course in either case the shell can be replaced, I'm not worried personally, I'll upgrade to Windows 8 at work (I'm the Windows admin, I need to know how to use the latest Windows) and I'll just replace the shell with something that gives me a useful desktop, same as the Linux lead has done on his system. However neither of us should have to. These people should be smarter. They should save the tablet UI for tablets and have a good desktop UI for desktops.

You mean it'll be Vista all over again - people will take one look at the horror, then just refuse to upgrade from the predecessor until Microsoft gets their act together. Everyone I know skipped Vista altogether, and kept on using XP until Seven came out.

They largely fixed UAC. It was a well-intentioned idea, but Vista's implimentation was very awkward - it'd pop up authorisation boxes for every little change, to the point that it didn't even provide security as people habitually clicked 'yes' every time. Seven changed it around so only things that really needed authorisation asked. Really, though, I think it was more that by the time Seven came out, sticking with XP was getting much more difficult. A lack of new hardware support, the looming threat of the

The main issue with Vista was the idiocy between intel and Microsoft. Intel begged MS to lower the base system requirements of what it meant to be Vista certified. The result was an untested OS, on hardware that should have never been Vista certified. This decision created a huge snowball effect. Vista was not terrible on good, robust, stable hardware (it wasnt especially polished either). What earned it the ire of everyone can mostly be traced to Intel foisting inadequate hardware on us and MS allowing it

I believe that MS decided that tablets were the main focus of this release and features for desktop / legacy systems taking a back seat. If so it would explain why stuff that should be in Metro simply isn't, such as folders, or the ability to zoom out the UI to fit more tiles into the space. Just those two things would go 90% of the way to making Metro tolerable to desktop users.

The experience is so borderline awful that I think Windows 8 will be as reviled as Windows Me and Windows Vista were. At least o

I am really just getting sick of this fucking tablet/smartphone obsession UI designers have these days. We get it, the smartphone market is huge. That's wonderful, I love mine, by all means let's have good UIs for them. But stop trying to fucking force that shit on the desktop. It is a different paradigm.

Exactly.

it's why even Android tablets are outselling "tablet PCs" nevermind the iPad. Going the opposite way is equally painful.

Touch devices must have a different UI out of necessity - a desktop interface

I think Metro could work pretty well on a desktop if it offered functionality analogous to the start menu but it doesn't.

Let's be honest, the Start Menu is a horrible hack that is useful only because it's hard to find where the Applications are stored on the hard drive (do you know where the Notepad binary is?) It's something people have gotten used to, but it's not something that is any way a great example of UI design.

There are other serious problems with Windows 8, but if they can get rid of the start menu, they should.

Nothing wrong with the idea of an application menu. It works. It's efficient, it's fast. The big annoyance for me with the windows start menu is the breaking of the cardinal rule of interface design: consistancy. Things move around. For example, I am in the habbit at work of bringing up a remote desktop client with ctrl-esc R. That used to work. Then I ran another program starting with R, and the menu rearranged itsself, and ctrl-esc R did something else entirely! That should not happen. Metro takes the thi

Er no, nothing like GNOME did. First off there is a very loose coupling on Linux between the desktop and the apps that run inside it mostly via protocols developed by freedesktop.org. So if you don't like GNOME3 as your desktop you are free to use any other desktop but with the same apps. You can even have more than one desktop available in the same dist if you want. Secondly, GNOME 3 is first and foremost about the desktop experience, not tablet experience. It is clearly got aspirations to be usable with tablets but it's nowhere close to that yet. Thirdly, GNOME 3 is rather well implemented and pretty elegant. It's certainly not without its faults (Linus went into a valid rant about some of them the other day) but it has well thought out workflows and works well. Fourth if you really hate some particular behaviour and don't want to switch outright you can write an extension to change it. The Mint distribution have customised GNOME 3 so much it more closely resembles GNOME 2 while benefiting from compositing and all the rest.

Microsoft has a knack for foisting inappropriate user interfaces on victims. Witness Windows Mobile, which was actually a very good mobile OS underneath its hideously dysfunctional skin, but was completely unusable "out of the box" in any efficient or pleasant manner. Nontechnical users bought WinMo phones, fought with them for a few hours, then angrily took them back to the store. More motivated users spent a month tweaking them, and eventually ended up with a phone that was quite nice & a definite ste

And Windows loses its one strong point - familiarity. Leaving it with short battery life and most likely scary heat issues.

By the way, I like my travelling arrangement with my Xoom a lot more that the transformer's snap-together concept. For me, operating on an airliner fold out tray is a prime requirement and the Transformer loses two ways: 1) the screen can't be moved around independently of the keyboard and 2) the trackpad adds a lot of real estate to the keyboard that I don't need because I can just touch the screen (and get out a dedicated bluetooth trackpad when desk space is available). The airliner compatibility issue is also why battery life is important to me and why this Windows transformer simply will not do, even if it had a real OS.

Windows 7 SP 1 runs with secureBoot and EFI fine. Also every single EFI implementation has an option to disable it since XP is still heavily used and will be used for many years just like OS/2 options are still in many bioses today.

Windows 8 looks pretty much like Windows 7, if you turn off the "Metro" Interface.

Windows 7 = ver 6.1
Windows 8 = ver 6.2

Edit "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RPEnabled" to have a value of 0 and reboot. Now the start button works like you want. You don't have to leave the desktop. Put Metro back by setting it to 1, of course.

I think "metro" is an apt name - it is basic transportation for the smelly masses, and you only see it when it is in your way, or you want to be somewhere else. That said, it is a good interface for people who mostly do just a few things.

I haven't used Win8 much yet, but it seems pretty snappy - who knows maybe Microsoft made it more efficient for tablets, but you can get the benefits using it like a desktop.

As a company, nVidia doesn't play too nice with free and Open Source software. Then again, they don't sue the pants off the software developers either, so you can mod them neutral. But enough reverse engineering has been done to make most (save the latest and greatest) nVidia powered graphic processors run fairly well using non-proprietary drivers [freedesktop.org].

But enough reverse engineering has been done to make most (save the latest and greatest) nVidia powered graphic processors run fairly well using non-proprietary drivers

Which doesn't help if everything still sold new has the Nouveau-incompatible "latest and greatest". In such a case, anyone who wants to run free software would have to buy used. Is this the case or not the case?

I've spent a fair bit of time over the past years talking to manufacturers about supporting open source (FreeBSD specifically, but also in general) and I hear the same thing: they need customers to tell them that they want it to be able to devote any funding to it. This is easy for server stuff, as it's easy to produce customers who are going to say 'we want to buy 10,000 new machines this month that have 10Gig ethernet controllers with in-tree drivers'. It's much harder to find people saying the same thing about mobile hardware. No one refuses to buy an Android handset or tablet because it has blob drivers, for example. It's getting slightly easier with GPUs, because customers buying them for compute clusters want open source drivers so that they can verify correctness in certain code paths.

A major problem is that many capabilities of modern graphic cards are as much about software as they are about hardware. Think back 15 years, to a period when dialup modems still mattered. Remember the hell and grief Linux users went through over "Winmodems"? Here's the punchline -- the hardware itself actually WAS abundantly well-documented. For the most part, a HSP winmodem is nothing more than a cheap soundcard with an RJ-11 jack and some parts to match the signal level between TTL logic and a live phone

Some of those SGI people that got badly burnt by patent trolls ended up at Nvidia. I can't see Nvidia opening up their source code while some software patents too obvious to have a right to exist cover just about everything in 3D graphics.

Not to mention I've been running various Linuxes on tablets since at least the 486/40 Toshiba Dynapad T200CS still stuck in my closet. People seem to forget that tablets weren't invented when the iPad came out and have been around forever.

At first I thought, who wants a hot Core i7 tablet running Windows when they can get a sleek iPad or Android device with 10 hours of battery? But it makes a lot more sense as a business laptop that can transform into a tablet (rather than the other way around). Many business users have a laptop dock on their desk and at the end of the day they disconnect and carry their laptop home to continue work, perhaps with another dock at home. This is an extension of that idea. When it's set up on the desk it's exact

Looks to be fanless, but with lots of vents, more troubling is the battery life if it's sucking down 4, or 5 times the juice, are we talking 3 hours instead of 15? Presumably not that bad, but are we talking >8 at least?? Not much good if it can't handle a working day.

From the article, the air-vent comment:"The tablet is positively riddled with air vents. If we assume that the Transformer Book uses the lowest-power Core i7 CPU, the 3667U (17-watt TDP), we’re still talking about a chip that uses at

If you've ever looked at an Asus Transformer and wished that it was slightly bigger, had an x86 processor, and ran Windows...

... and then I wished that my boss fired me at work for being an Atheist, and I came home to find my dog run over by a pick-up truck parked in my drive way, and I went in the house to find my wife in bed with the redneck who owns the truck, and the redneck grabs his gun and shoots me in the nuts.

Well, on second thought, all of that would be better than running Windows.

"Very nice" as in, "not so incredibly ugly that it hurts my eyes the way XP did." Come on, it's still a complex, undiscoverable mess with strange design decisions. To set an environment variable, you have to right-click on the hard drive and go to advanced settings. How does that make any sense at all? Think of the horrid mess that is the registry, the difficulty of uninstalling things, think of the miserable default DOS shell (which incidentally, as simple as it is, has incompatibilities from one version o

Well firstly ASUS make Windows tablets equivalent to MOST of their Android ones, the A numbers are Android, the W numbers Windows, it's not new that they make a Windows tablet, they just don't have much market traction.

So the A500's equivalent was the W500 (which was based on AMD's low power chipset):http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Iconia-W500-BZ467-10-1-Inch-Tablet/dp/B004SBI2PW

I'm waiting on the A700s (one coming from Acer, one from Asus, and maybe a Samsung unit too), which is the Android 1920x1200 screen Quad core Tegra 3. These Windows tablets don't sell, perhaps Windows 8 will help them, but they're really not so useful on touch screens or low power long battery life devices. Both the Asus and Acer ones are due this month. The Samsung one is rumoured but not released (I'm guessing that's because Apple screen is provided by Samsung and Apple probably got an exclusive windows on high res screens from Samsung).

Android is somewhat complicated. The core parts of it are free, yes (Though I understand google tends to be a little slow releasing the source for the latest versions), but in actual use manufacturers typically mix it with propritary extras and then lock it down hard through hardware - so, even though you have access to the source in princible, you can't actually run it on most devices without the manufacturer's secret firmware-signing key, and the user is kept from having administrative access short of hac

Android is definitely not like iOS because it allows use of applications from "Unknown sources" without a recurring fee. And it's not quite like Mac OS X because the GUI parts are part of AOSP. It's just the Google Play Store and specific applications that interact with Google services that are non-free.

There are manufacturer specific Android versions that are locked down as far as installing apps as well.

All devices that have the Google Play Store allow sideloading through Android Debug Bridge. Even AT&T phones during the first few months of Android phones' availability on that carrier, when "Unknown sources" was unavailable, supported adb install. This support is part of the Compatibility Definition Document; without it, Google is unwilling to license the Google Play Store software.

And I bet those manufacturer specific GUIs aren't open.

There is an official GUI for Android. There is no official GUI for Darwin.

Both OS X/iOS and Android are OSs with open portions and closed portions. Both have an open kernel. There are various open GUIs available for both. Manufacturers also make closed GUIs, for both. Parts of both systems on actual devices, particularly cell phones, are invariably closed (the baseband, for example). Manufacturers also provide a variety of closed applications for both OSs, many of which are installed by default and in some cases, on both OSs, may not be removable.

Both have an open kernel. There are various open GUIs available for both. Manufacturers also make closed GUIs, for both.

I agree with most of what you say in the paragraph. But the key difference that I'm trying to point out is that for Android, unlike for Mac OS X, a freely licensed GUI is distributed by the same entity that maintains the kernel and the core libraries and is considered the platform's official GUI. This means there is enough of a freely licensed operating system for, say, Archos to sell its 7th and 8th generation devices with mostly vanilla AOSP on them.

But if you buy a tablet from Amazon, you're going to get something pretty much as locked down as a tablet from Apple.

I don't think so. It seems that the Microsoft tax will be mandatory. I don't mind the money wasted as much as being part of Microsoft's statistics. So I don't buy computers with Windows preinstalled.And the first EEE PC's were so promising...

They don't seem to be able to make a laptop ready CPU. Realize that ARM CPUs cap out right around where the Atom starts. Ok fine, nothing wrong with that there is a MASSIVE low end and embedded market and ARM rules it. However, it does mean that for laptops, it isn't so useful. It is also lacking features in that arena as well. Really 64-bit is what people are after for desktops and laptops today. The new Atoms can do x64 no problem, ARM for all their chatter about it can't.

This is all extremely low end, laptop wise too. As noted this particular product doesn't use an Atom, it uses a real Core i chip which is a good bit more powerful and is what most people are after in their laptop.

So have a chat with ARM about when, or maybe more accurately if, they plan on moving in to the higher end CPU space. Until they have something there, I doubt there'll be much interest in an ARM laptop.

Really 64-bit is what people are after for desktops and laptops today.

That is only relevant if you wish to access more than 2 or 3GB of RAM per process. If you consider that the majority of netbooks being sold only come with about 1GB of RAM, then 64-bit CPUs are essentiallly meaningless. And this even without considering PAE stuff.

That is only relevant if you wish to access more than 2 or 3GB of RAM per process.

Or if you want more processor registers without having to waste cycles spilling them to the stack all the time. ARM, for example, has fifteen to x86's eight. I don't know much about x86-64, but it also has more registers than x86.

And this even without considering PAE stuff.

Desktop versions of Windows have typically shipped with PAE off because so many device drivers were incompatible with PAE.

I call FUD. 64-bit is only "what people are after" because of marketing. Nothing more or less. I mean, think about it, what really is the point of 64-bit?

64-bit integer maths isn't really a genuine requirement, and on the rare occasions it is needed the impact of performing 64-bit integer maths on a 32-bit CPU is not too immense. As for 64-bit floating-point maths, most ARM chips have come with this built-in for many years.

Then there's 64-bit addressing, which in reality is a myth, since no CPUs actually support 64-bit addressing. Nobody needs to access 16EiB of RAM, or will need to for several decades to come. I believe that x86-64 chips currently top out at 48-bit addressing, which is 256TiB. 32-bit ARM chips top out at 4GiB, which admittedly is starting to feel a little cramped and is arguably inadequate, but the Cortex-A15 introduced 40-bit addressing (1TiB) which addresses this concern.

The reality of "64-bit" for x86, and the performance advantages it has brought over IA32, has been that it's addressed deficiencies of Intel's old IA32 architecture. The main improvement derives from the addition of 8 new general purpose registers, bringing x86-64's tally to 16. ARM chips have always had 16 general purpose registers.

I'd argue that ARM have already designed cores that are capable of playing in the laptop space. Cortex-A15 MPCore seems up to the job to me.

If you're still not sold on my arguments that you don't really need 64-bit, ARMv8 was announced last November which is a 64-bit ARM instruction set. Applied Micro's X-Gene CPU is based on this.

Besides all of this, given that their business is designing cores rather than manufacturing it's not really down to ARM to push into the laptop space. It's down to their licensees to put ARM cores into laptop CPUs, and to manufacture them using processes that will allow those chips to run at clock speeds competitive with Intel and AMDs CPUs.

I call FUD. 64-bit is only "what people are after" because of marketing. Nothing more or less. I mean, think about it, what really is the point of 64-bit?

Being able to address more than 2GB of memory without the code getting horrific. Yes, you could conceivably run up to 4GB with only some problems, such as oddness with ptrdiff_t, but after that and you'd need some sort of manual paging solution with overlays or something like that; it was tried in the bad old DOS days (except with lower limits) and it was truly nasty so expanding to 64-bit (i.e., getting a wider address bus) is much better.

These http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/smartbook [genesi-usa.com] don't look half bad. There are many many more on the market, but they are overshadowed by trendier tablets. Maybe windows 8 arm port will cause this to change.

If you can run a corporate win 8 desktop on arm, why would you want a powerhogging Intel?

Imho, they do look rather bad. Old CPU, old/small/slow flash drive, unknown amount of RAM.
I'd like a Cortex-A9 or above, 2+ GB RAM, and a mechanical hard drive.
Where is this market with "many many more" ones? I've searched for a long time and can't find anything except for the EFIKA, Lemote, and a few old demonstrations [youtube.com].

I have the TF101 (the original Asus Transformer) with keyboard. It is effectively an ARM-based Android laptop, with touch screen (and Gorilla glass!), but I can turn it into a tablet whenever I want.

I love it. I never bother turning it off unless it needs the occasional reboot. It lasts all day - watch movies on the train, read ebooks, play games, surf the web in bed. Very portable entertainment device with enough screen space and keyboard to do lightweight word processing or presentations if I need it.

My wife surprised me with the TF201 (Transformer Prime) for our anniversary. I agree, very nice setup with the keyboard dock. Essentially a netbook with a touchscreen, and you can yank the screen out and make it a tablet. The battery life is literally all-day, and videos play very nicely. (Converted a Blu-ray to 720p and it looks spectacular.) And game graphics are impressive - current-generation-console level, at least. Only complaint is that the file manager is sloooow and a little buggy for big files.

I think for the people who do want decent battery life, the new Transformer running the latest low-power Core i3 CPU, built-in Ivy Bridge graphics, and 4 GB of RAM is all they need. Unlike Intel's past built-in graphics chips, the HD 4000 GPU built into the Ivy Bridge chipset is no slouch at even 3-D graphics, so for most users there is no significant advantage to offering an additional GPU unit.

original transformer cost me 600 bucks, (32 gig model) i got it more as a replacement netbook than as a tablet, though i do frequently use it without the keyboard I can bring it along without bothering with power cables for up to a week depending on how much i am going to use it, and the power adapter is TINY more like a cell phone charger than a laptop power supply, the fact that the keyboard/USB host/dock is a power booster rather than a drain is just gravy.

Asus simply cannot be trusted with your money. My Transformer TF101 was sold to me on the belief--as Asus told review sites like Anandtech--that the dock would be compatible with other Transformer-series models going forward. That was a lie; it was specific to the TF101 and is now effectively worthless to me when I upgrade the tablet in the future. Had they told the truth, I wouldn't have bought the dock (and therefore, likely wouldn't have bought the Transformer in the first place.)

That's about all I can say as I've been seriously looking at the Acer Iconia W5xx. The interesting thing is, it's a Win7 Tablet that comes with a keyboard dock and is sized the same as a standard notebook at 8x11 inches. It's also spec'd/priced to compete directly with the same size/spec'd iPad unlike the Transformer and many of the other tablets I've looked at recently.

As I said, it's sized the same at 8x11 and the weight is almost the same as my 1/2 inch notebooks for school when they're full of paper/handouts and such. So I think Acer has really nailed the form factors and price point they needed to.

W510 is still 1.5x the weight and 2x the thickness of iPad, not to mention Transformer (which is both lighter and thinner).

Also, its dock kinda sucks. For one, it's too light, so when you dock the tablet, it really wants to tilt. It's usable on a hard surface like a table, but not on your laps (so it's not really a laptop hybrid). And the reason why it's so light is because it doesn't have an internal battery for extra juice when the tablet is docked, like Transformer does.

1) Good battery performance.2) I can pick the thing up and use it when ever I want with out the damn "Windows in installing update 1 of 18".. "Windows is restarting to finish applying updates"... "Please don't turn your machine off, windows is applying a critical update"..

This may sound frivolous, and the configuration can probably be changed to avoid this. But my last netbook (with Windows 7) was not used too frequently, but every time I turned that thing on, waited for what felt like 5 minutes for it to boot up then get nagged to apply updates, postpone them, etc, then a java update would pop-up, then some other update... What's worse, if I walked away after turning it on (while it was booting, perhaps to make a coffee or get a beer) I'd return and find I missed the opportunity to postpone the update and find the thing shutting down again to apply an update (without me asking it to) - really not a convenient way for a device like this to behave.

I see tablets and netbooks as a convenience machine not a workhorse, and Windows just sours that experience. Let's hope Windows 8 fixes these short comings.

I know you probably think I'm just a Microsoft basher, but I'm not, despite being a Linux user I find Windows 7 is a perfectly reasonable desktop OS and don't really have much to complain about. I'd suggest it to any non tech savvy user who didn't want a Mac. But on a tablet? Given past experiences, no-thank-you.

One of the first things I do when I set up a Windows PC for my own use is set it to download updates automatically and let me choose when to install them. Then I can tell it to install updates over a lunch break or other natural stopping point.

I don't know if you're trying to troll everyone but... you do know that you can turn off automatic updates right? My preferred setting is "Download and Notify me, but do not install" mode. That way when you're ready to do the update, you don't have to wait for the download. But I will tell you from my personal experience (having a Dell streak [free gift from Dell to get my work to buy them, they suck], an HP Touchpad, iPad 1, iPad 3, and an Asus Transformer) that Android doesn't have very good battery lif

My post was to illustrate why I don't think this kind of device will have much impact on Android's success. The masses will not change the configuration on the machine as you suggest, they buy a device and expect it to work well without tweaking, configuring etc - having the ability is somewhat moot if the user doesn't know, understand or care about doing so. Perhaps if they came configured as you suggest by default, things might be different.

This is true, most people do not know how to change those kinds of settings. And at some corporations, they do not allow you to change the settings anyway. It is their way or the highway.

I agree, I don't think an x86 version of the transformer will take off. But you never know. There are certainly times when I wish that my tablet were more suited for development work. I could easily write code on a tablet, and I just need a light weight compiler to do sanity checks on my code. But I'd never give up my

Ubuntu needs to get off their asses and release their Android integration they demo'd a while back. They're keeping it to themselves not even available for purchase. I think they're looking for a manufacturer to build a device while there are tons of people ready and willing to install it on their own rooted devices.

Why? Really.. why? There is no reason Android needs to become a desktop OS.

I'm sorry, I don't buy the "everything must converge" theory and, quite frankly, when Win8 comes out it will probably kill the idea off once and for all. There isn't an institution that I can think of that will put Windows 8 on their desktops unless they want to drive their users and support people insane.

However I do believe Linux and Android apps should be ported back and forth... but for other reasons.

I can do everything I can do on my PC. Just not as quickly. Or in as nice of a user interface. Or was well. And I'm missing some features that I really would like. And the guy that wrote the knock off app is no where to be found so support is non-existent. But other then that it's great!